Xiaxin Wangis an economist interested in behavioral responses to taxation in various settings. Within the field of taxation, his interest is broad: elasticity of taxable income, bunching approach, tax evasion and tax avoidance, personal income tax.

Xianxin Wang’s recent research compares two main approaches to estimate the elasticity of taxable income. A main finding is that under the setting of personal income tax, when there is a natural income growth and fixed kink points, the bunching approach can only capture temporary income adjustments while the tax reform approach is able to capture permanent behavioral adjustment. Further, when the economy is stagnant and income does not fluctuate, the two approaches converge. His paper on tax evasion and avoidance of US households finds that, on average, for the US self-employed businesses, the scale of tax evasion is comparable to that of tax avoidance. When decomposing the self-employed into those with corporations and those without, his findings indicate that while the corporate self-employed rely more on tax avoidance, the noncorporate self-employed rely more on tax evasion.

Drawn to academia for its freedom to choose and explore topics in detail, Xiaxin Wang is happy to join the University of Michigan Department of Economics and to work alongside its exceptional faculty. “Joy comes from finding an empirical pattern that has not been documented before, or ask an unanswered question and propose some tentative answer, or simply appreciate beautiful findings by other researchers.” Starting with the 2019 winter semester, he will teach an undergraduate course on Chinese Economy.